And day after day, week after week, while he sought an opening, he very
nearly starved. In a couple of months he had arrived at the conclusion
that the fight in London was more sordid and more dispiriting than the
direst poverty in Paris. About this time he came in for a distasteful
piece of hack journalism, that brought him a disproportionate loathing
and an inadequate reward of five pounds. He was strongly tempted to
invest a part of this sole capital in returning to France. A couple of
days later a letter arrived through the London branch of the Paris
bankers from Henri de Poincy, back in the South of France on a holiday.
He asked for Ethan's private address, and said if he did not hear
something satisfactory by return he would conclude the beastly English
climate had made him ill; in which case he was straightway coming over
to look Ethan up, and persuade him to return to his friends in Nice. If
he did not hear by wire or letter in three days, De Poincy would come to
London and see what was the matter. They were all anxious at his
silence.
This determined the matter. Gano was not going to have his old friend
find him in his present plight. Besides, he already owed him money, and
had sworn to himself that he would not meet De Poincy again till he
could go to him with the sum in his hands. Henri was far from well off,
and, since his father's death the year before, had helped to support his
sisters. Ethan wired: "Leaving London; quite well; remembrance to all;
writing," and took the night-boat to Dieppe. He delayed further
communication till he knew Henri would be back in Petersburg, and by
that time he was able, by living on next to nothing, to return a part
of the loan, and to represent himself as intensely glad to be in his old
haunts again. These haunts were in reality very new, albeit in Paris;
but he did not enter into details further than to say he was
rediscovering the fact that he could write French much more easily and
much better than he could English, and was doing some book-reviewing for
the _Lendemain_.
He might have added, but did not, that he was getting at first-hand a
very considerable knowledge of the darker side of life, but had no
impulse to make artistic use of it. It did not stimulate, it did not
even interest--it paralyzed him. "If I'd had the makings of a genuine
poet in me," he admitted to Henri de Poincy afterwards, "those years
might have buffeted some good work out of me. But _my_ muse was a
miserable time-server, like the rest of my fine acquaintance. She left
me when I wanted bread. The fact was, I was _feeling_ life too keenly to
write about it. Poetizing in the face of such suffering as I saw and
shared seemed a drivelling impertinence. Life was more terrible, more
tremendous than anything any poet had said about it, or _could_ say."
Gano was unconsciously making of himself an obscure example of the fact
that a man's temperament will find him out upon the removal of the
artificial ballast. This removal so seldom takes place that the vaguest
notions abound as to any given person's specific gravity. We go through
life unconsciously floated, balanced, by family, by inherited friends,
inherited pursuits, inherited opinions, inherited money--by a thousand
conditions not made by ourselves, but found ready-made to our hands, an
expression of other people's energy, supporting or neutralizing our own.
Gano's inclinations, not being volcanic or epoch-making, had been, up to
the time of the break with his grandfather, dutifully filtered through
environing circumstance. Even so, Mr. Tallmadge had had occasion to
condemn his grandson's "queer tastes," his "visionary notions," his
girlish compassion for suffering, his hypersensitiveness to blame, his
even greater shrinking from hurting the feelings of others. The tough
old New Englander's contempt for "sensitiveness" had at least done Ethan
the service of giving him an exterior self-control, which seemed so far
to deny the feelings it only masked, that he was able to pass
comfortably in the crowd as a person more impassive, if anything, than
the majority. But as soon as he was left to himself, and followed no
longer by critical eyes, his natural bias announced itself. He felt less
and less drawn to the insouciant artist life of the town; the
happy-go-lucky ways lost their first fresh savor; the suppers, the
orgies, the endless comment, quite as eager as any of the work and often
more brilliant; the short, merry life of the happy little flies that
buzz so busily about the flower-garden of art, and that vanish with the
vanishing of day--they all ended by striking some note of discord in
him, and making him feel out of place there. "Was he getting too old for
this kind of thing?" he asked himself, with modern youth's morbid
consciousness of the value certain people set upon one time of life to
the exclusion of any other, forgetting that "to travel deliberately
through one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education," and
the heart out of enlightened satisfaction as well.
But Gano was, perhaps, only following the unwritten law that rules such
haunts and their frequenters, for these gay Bohemians are all young--and
very young indeed. No one knows where they go when their short hour is
done. Their laughter lags a little behind the rest one day, and the next
they are not there. A new face is in the old place, a younger voice is
screaming theories and outlaughing the laughers who are left.
Gano knew whither one of these superannuated revellers of twenty-five or
so had retired. This was a great good-looking Irishman, with an
unaccountable French tongue in his rough, tawny head, the hardest
worker, deepest drinker, and wildest theorist in the particular little
circle that Gano had of late frequented. Dick Driscoll and he had got
into the habit of coming away together from the modest café where the
circle met. Now and then the older man would drag Gano off on some wild
adventure, or they would scour Paris with no definite end in view,
arguing, disputing, catching effects, till midnight met the dawn. From
living in the same quarter they came by-and-by to live under the same
roof, as a direct result of the Irishman's being as ready to discuss
theories of life in general, or even Gano's work in particular, as he
had been to harangue "the painter fellows" about brushwork and values.
He pronounced those early poems "most awfully good, you know," and
prophesied great things for the future. But for all this, deeper and
deeper the conviction cut into Gano that he was not of the stuff that
"makes its way in the world." This without any of the feeling that
usually accompanies it--of contempt for those who were differently
constituted. He sometimes soothed his harassed spirit, and consoled
himself for his failures, by an odd inversion of common hopes. He bade
himself realize that success would not bring him happiness, so why join
the thoughtless chorus condemning poverty, obscurity, and hard work?
These last were not the heads of his indictment against life. At other
times he would shut his eyes to this revelation of himself to himself.
"Skin-deep! skin-deep, like yours!" he burst out at Driscoll's
observation on his friend's growing dissatisfaction with the scheme of
things.
The Irishman was rather proud of his Schopenhauerism. It represented to
him a mere mental gymnastic. This, too, although hard work, hard living,
and hard drinking had injured his health, and the fact was more and more
apparent. However, it is something behind experience that determines
whether a man shall be an optimist or not. Gano shrank from an
imputation of pessimism, as people do in whom the tendency is inborn and
inveterate. "I tell you, Driscoll, if we weren't sharing it, we would
think there was some good served by the ugliness and pain in the world,
just as our betters do. If we took our place again in the holiday-making
class, we should be as diverted as the rest, with all the games and
make-believes. We, too, should forget the essential cruelty of things."
But behind the boast was a heart-sinking, and a sense that it was a lie.
He would try again: "Because life has treated me cavalierly I think I
have little zest for it. If I weren't bruised from crown to toe, I'd
think the world a bed of roses." And then he would remember that that
was far from being the account he would ever have given of his
consciousness of things.
Before he betook himself to Bohemia, Gano had spent no small portion of
his time in the brilliant circle Madame Astier's grace and wit had
gathered round her. The young American not only cherished an enthusiasm
for his middle-aged hostess, but he discovered a deep admiration as well
for the lady's husband, a distinguished advocate, whom she obviously
adored. Gano's sensibilities did, it is true, shrink at first before the
man's pitiless cynicism, which spared few persons and fewer ideals. But
although merely dazzled at the beginning by his brilliancy, Gano came in
time to be proud of his friendship, and to recognize in his point of
view a wholesome, bitter tonic, a corrective to certain ills that young
flesh is heir to. This man of fifty-four, who would have shrugged
derisively at the notion of "teaching" anybody anything, was still in
many young eyes the very type of the modern philosopher: believing
blandly in the scientific point of view, unmoved by sentimentalities,
unblinded by enthusiasms, keen-witted, farsighted, practising with
eminent success, in the most highly civilized society in the world, the
most difficult of the arts--the art of living.
Gano was very much shaken by the terrible story of the double suicide of
this brilliant pair, whose marriage had been so romantic, whose life
together had seemed the one ideal of the old kind that they admitted
into their smiling existence.
M. Astier, as all the world was being told, had returned home as usual
on this particular afternoon from the Palais de Justice. His wife had
been holding a reception. One lady remained after the other visitors had
gone. When at last the door closed upon her, too, Madame Astier went to
her husband's library and told him that the last visitor had outstayed
the others to say that her husband was going to fight a duel on her
account the next day with M. Astier, with whom she (the visitor) had an
intrigue of three years' standing. She had come to Madame Astier to
prevent the men's meeting.
A violent scene between husband and wife.
"The end has come!'" exclaims Astier.
"Yes, yes; we can't go on living after this!" cries the distracted wife.
She flies to her dressing-room and attempts to swallow poison. Astier's
secretary rushes after her. While he is wrenching the poison away, the
report of fire-arms. Both rush back to the library, where they find M.
Astier bathed in blood, dying. The wife, before she can be hindered,
puts the smoking pistol to her head, fires another fatal shot, and the
tragedy is done.
Gano had talked to Driscoll from time to time of the Astiers, of
Clémenceau, and the other habitués of those delightful soirées, and of
the regret he sometimes felt that he had not told his friends frankly of
the change in his fortunes, and the reason he did not any longer
frequent the Faubourg St. Honoré.
"But I couldn't, somehow, talk to them of a thing we couldn't either
laugh at or satirize. Still, they'd be among the first people that I'd
go to if I had a stroke of luck."
And now, out of that atmosphere of gayety and _blague_, this! No sky
apparently so cloudless but from its blue a bolt may fall. Ethan had
rushed out and bought the _Justice_. He read Clémenceau's article aloud,
translating hurriedly as he went on for a compatriot of Driscoll's, who
had happened to drop in for a pipe and a crack:
"'This pitiless scoffer, Astier, this despairing sceptic, who spoke so
slightingly of women and love, is now discovered to have been a man of
soft and sentimental nature, without any reserve of appliances against
woman's wiles or surging passion. The so-called libertine, cauterized
by Paris against Paris, was upset by an event which could have been
easily foreseen. In a situation of the most commonplace kind, he so
thoroughly lost all self-control that he could hit upon no other remedy
than self-destruction.' How contemptuously he writes of his old friend's
'losing self-control' and the rest of it," said Gano, angrily, "as if
the double death was the real tragedy!"
"What then?"
"Why, the moment when that nice woman discovered that the husband she
had married so romantically, and who had been so devoted to her all
those years, had turned round and betrayed her in the last chapter. I
agree with them both: it wasn't much use to go on living after that."
"Oh, as to going on living," observed Driscoll, shortly, "it would
puzzle most people to tell why they think that much use."
"But _these_ people--" began Gano.
"More like the rest of the world than they pretended, that's all," the
visitor summed up, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. "I've once
or twice come near to some tragedy, as Gano has to this. It does feel a
bit odd to realize we're all living our peaceful lives on the edge of a
volcano. But, bless you!"--he clapped on his hat with a rakish air--"we
get so used to it we forget all about it till our turn comes."
"Meanwhile, we're all in the conspiracy to pretend that tragedy is dead
and buried in the works of the great dramatists," said Driscoll.
"Good job, too," commented the departing visitor, nodding to the two
friends as he went off.
"Your cheerful compatriot is right," said Ethan, shaken suddenly out of
his rôle as Nature's apologist. "Life simply doesn't bear being thought
about."
Whereupon they proceeded to talk about it for hours on end. They uttered
a deal of raw philosophy in those days, often with passion, sometimes
with hope. Driscoll, for all his profession of pessimism, had moments
of splendid confidence that he had stumbled upon the Perfect Way. Gano
would shake his head, repeating:
"'Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.
"'... Their words to scorn
Are scattered, and their mouths are stopped with dust.'"
Through a young painter from Basle, these two were among the first
outside of the German circle to have some realization of the magnitude
of Friedrich Nietzsche as a force to be reckoned with. But Gano shrank
from the sound and fury of the iconoclast as much as from his more
coherently expressed doctrines. It was as abhorrent to his new doubts as
it was to his old faiths to hear that Nietzsche had said (speaking of
Germany), "Nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two
great European narcotics--alcohol and Christianity." Driscoll, knowing a
good deal more about the first than he did about the last, professed his
withers to be unwrung. What was there in the utterance that Gano should
gibe at?
Almost from the beginning they wore their rue with a difference.
Driscoll raged at concrete mistakes and injustices in the scheme of
things as presented to Richard Driscoll. The other, seeming to think he
had fewer personal wrongs to complain of, capable of too keen a
self-criticism to imagine himself a genius to whom the world owed
special privileges, was coming rapidly to a more serious indictment of
life on the basis of "the dread irrationality of the whole affair."
It is not a happy subject for contemplation, perhaps, but it is possible
to ignore too absolutely that this is the attitude of mind of a vast
number of the young people of the time. No one with his classics in his
mind, no one even who has not forgotten Montaigne and Shakespeare,
thinks that this desperate guessing at "the riddle of the painful
earth" is an exercise peculiar to our day. What is perhaps new is the
commonness of the interrogation among young men, rich and poor,
industrious and idle, who have not genius wherewith to clothe and deck
their failure to produce the answer. Such men have not the distractions
and rewards of genius to take their minds off the fact of failure.
What does it matter if you, in common with all the laboring earth, are
feeling in every fibre the force of the Duke's bitter exhortation to
Claudio? what does it matter if you can turn life's discords into music
such as this? Even a less lofty strain is reward sufficient for the
singer, reason enough to reconcile the monstrous egoism of genius to the
presence in the world of great sorrows that can be transmuted into
little songs. But to those whose music is shut up within them all their
days, what shall help them bear the deafening discord of the jangling on
and on of things that hurries them towards silence? There is an answer
to this question, but it is not found among those usually given, which
are for the most part variations of the philosophy of the ostrich.
Gano used to tell, laughing, of the way a great English lady met her
son's shrinking confession of some deep, intellectual difficulty: "Do
rouse yourself, St. John. Low spirits are such bad form."
"What was cultivated society?" Gano demanded of the Irishman. "A device
for preventing people from serious thinking. Acceptance of this view was
implicit in the very roots of language. You had to 'divert,' to
'distract' a man from the peril of looking facts in the face before you
could expect him to be moderately happy. Games for grown-up children,
the puerilities of country-house parties, what are they? Sage devices
for preventing people from thinking, traps to snare and cage the
intelligence--civilization's harmless anæsthetics. Oh yes, no mistake
about our diversions being more wisely chosen in these 'scientific'
times than in the days when the one escape was into the wine-cup's
_cul-de-sac_. What were they all--drinking, opium-eating, and the
rest--but simply forms of that protest most thinking creatures find
themselves making at some stage of their too-conscious life?"
Driscoll accepted this view of his excesses with equanimity, reminding
Ethan in turn that there are in all ages bystanders at the board while
the cup goes round--old ladies of both sexes ready to ask, "What
pleasure can men take in making beasts of themselves?" and there is not
always a philosopher at the objector's elbow to answer, "He, madam, who
makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." The great
moralist knew from personal experience what he was talking about. He had
the sincerity to admit that his own long-abandoned drinking had not at
any time been from love of good-fellowship. Away with the genial lie, "I
drank to be rid of myself!"
But Gano's point was that these old childish ways of hiding the head
under the bedclothes to keep out of the dark no longer comfort so many
of the grown-up children of the world. "They are afraid," he said, "not
only of the night, but, with a surer wisdom, of the morning. It is not
so easy to keep to-morrow at bay. Men need less and less the warning of
the taverner's wife: 'They one and all regret it in the morning.'"
Said Gano to himself, summing up his survey: "We should not depend on,
but keep in reserve, some draught with no such menace in the dregs. What
one surer than that which brings a good-night and no morrow at all
forever any more?"
Not, he felt, as a result of his own hard knocks, but out of unbiassed
observation of the common lot, again and again, without personal
resentment and without passion, he found himself reverting to the
thought of the unlivableness of life, unless a man should carry about a
conviction of freedom in his soul--a freedom that should be not a phrase
but a potent fact, conferring sovereignty over life and death, and so
lifting men above the meaner tricks of chance.
If solving the riddle in "high Roman fashion" did not "make Death proud
to take us," which he felt to be beside the mark, the more intimate
realization that escape is possible seemed to rob life of her more
intolerable menace. It was not food for fear or brooding, but for
exultation, this recognition that, should other remedies fail, one might
still do
"That thing that ends all other deeds,
That shackles accidents, and bolts up change."
If the sovereign remedy had not been discovered in the past, the
Nineteenth Century would have invented it. Never before had life been so
hard for the many, never before had its value been so impugned. It might
be true that every one should make a good fight. It could not be
recommended to any but the craven that he should accept a degrading
captivity in addition to defeat. Yet those were the terms upon which
more than half the world lived. As for himself, it grew plainer and
plainer that he should bear as many buffets as he could take like a man,
but no one had a right to ask him to accept the disgraceful terms on
which many of the excellent of earth were given their dole of bitter
bread. As for the women, the power of human endurance was in them not
glorified, as the foolish had thought, but debased, brutalized, a thing
for scorn and pointing. It was this side of the subject that ultimately
roused him out of the apathy that had threatened him. He had the sense
of being secretly a lantern-bearer, of carrying under his coat a
wonderful sort of Aladdin's lamp, and feeling it a selfish monopoly not
to cry out his discovery in the streets. For this light, that had been
so gallantly upborne, so well honored, of old, had been put out in the
more effeminate times, and fallen to utter discredit in these new "dark
ages." It was degraded to the uses of the vile, instead of shining
beacon-like upon the hill of honor, a guide less to the fallen than to
those who would keep from falling. Men had so many new inventions to
make, they had clean forgotten this. It was one of the lost arts, and
had need of rediscovery and new proclaiming with the accent of our time.
A strange ardor of proselytism fell upon him as he looked upon those
about him in whom he traced his own old fear of life: delicate women
toiling in terror and incommunicable agony of spirit, or those others,
more horrible still, accepting dully, or in the devil-may-care French
fashion, an existence incredibly vile. Why were they not told
"Ye have no friend,
But resolution and the briefest end."
It would be absurd to say not one would listen. He couldn't take up a
paper without seeing that some desperate soul had made the discovery
alone, unprompted, and with all the weight of Society, Law, the Church,
and ignorant human shrinking against the anarchy of the act. It should
be made less horribly hard, more admittedly honorable. Illogically
enough, perhaps, these were not thoughts he felt it possible to share
with a man in Driscoll's state of rapidly failing health. Gano would
drop any questions in their later discussions that tended too much that
way, and the conversation showed in this a curious alacrity. If Driscoll
pursued the matter, Gano would even go the length of cutting the
interview short. The intellectual barrier thus raised was the first
check to the deepening friendship. For himself, from the day that Gano
realized that life was voluntary, it became sweet. He found himself
growing more light-hearted than he had thought it lay in him to be. He
worked with a new zest. Poverty, hunger, they couldn't cow him now. He
had the whip-hand of them. "I haven't forgotten," he said to himself,
"what it's like to be well housed, and fed, and friended, and to listen
without misgiving to the world's fairy-tales; but, remembering the
gladdest day the old life had to give, I know it never brought me such a
surging, God-like joy as the burst of that revelation, _We are free!_ If
we endure the worst evils in this life, it is because we are willing to.
Even the meanest of mankind are not caught like vermin in a trap. Man's
best boast and inalienable patent of nobility is that he holds in his
hand a key to all the prisons of the earth. He may open the door of
escape for himself. How curious to feel anew the solace of the old Roman
boast: In this the gods are less to be envied than the beggar or the
slave; the high gods must live on, but man may die if he will. Oh, glad
tidings of great joy! oh, the sweet, fresh air of liberty, the sense of
power, the exaltation of the crushed and stifled spirit!" In his bare,
ill-lighted room the man who had so long been the spoiled favorite of
material good fortune, now with empty pockets, dinnerless, nearly
friendless, would, nevertheless, lift up hopeful young hands in a
defiant gladness, whispering to himself: "They taught me many things in
many schools for many years, but no man ever whispered I was free! I had
to find that out for myself."
In these latter days, when he went up-stairs to sit with Driscoll, he
sometimes found a woman moving quietly about the room. When she had
gone, there was always something there for the invalid's supper, and
Gano would suppress the fact that he had brought a double provision in
his pocket for an impromptu meal.
The woman wore one of those feature-destroying veils that made it
impossible to judge much of her appearance, but Gano had a vague
impression of slim middle age and unimpressive looks, soft ways, and a
sort of "mother-tenderness" about her. But she was so colorless, so much
more an influence than a person, that he did not realize he had never
heard, or at least never noticed, her voice, till one evening she said
_Bong soir_ in an amazing accent.
"English!" commented Ethan, involuntarily, as the door closed.
"Australian," corrected the sick man.
"She's rather neglected you lately," remarked Gano, as a kind of apology
for the unmistakable bulginess of his pockets.
He unloaded on the rickety table.
"I say, why do you bring all that truck in here?" Driscoll demanded,
ungraciously.
"You keep quiet! You've got to have somebody to do your marketing for
you, I suppose. I thought your Australian friend had thrown up the
post."
"So she had," grumbled the invalid. "Women are damned selfish."
"Well, they repent sometimes; there's that in their favor."
Gano set about making coffee.
"She didn't repent," mumbled Driscoll.
"Oh, is this the last of her?"
"No; I only meant I had to send for her." And then they talked of other
things.
The next time Gano saw the woman was after Driscoll got worse. He went
up one night, and found him pallid, speechless, wrestling with one of
his worst attacks of pain. The woman was bending over him.
"Please go and get that filled." She held out an empty bottle, hardly
looking at Gano.
He hurried obediently down-stairs. Behind his anxiety for the man he had
come to feel so much liking for, was a sense of surprise that the
Australian was not so middle aged as he had thought. "She's not
thirty-five," he speculated in between his wondering how Driscoll could
get on without a night-nurse; "and she's not bad looking." He was back
again, two steps at a time, with the medicine. Driscoll was quieter. The
woman motioned the bottle away. She was taking his temperature.
"Hospital nurse," was Gano's mental comment upon the air of usage and
competence. He sat there awhile, and then whispered:
"I'm in the room on the left at the bottom of the first flight, if you
want me."
She nodded, and he went down to his work.
When he looked up from his writing it was a quarter to one. Had the
woman gone and he not heard her pass? How was Driscoll? It was awfully
quiet overhead. With a tightening of the nerves he took his lamp and
hurried up-stairs. He knocked softly. No answer. Noiselessly, so that
the invalid should not be wakened, if indeed he were not ... he opened
the door. Driscoll was asleep, and breathing audibly. The woman was
asleep too, sitting on the floor, her head leaning against the side of
the bed, Driscoll's hand in one of hers. She looked still younger in the
peace of sleep, though obviously older than Driscoll, softened out of
her customary wooden immobility. Gano felt that he was seeing her real
face for the first time: the mask had fallen. She could never have been
pretty, but there was something in her face of nobility that prevented a
man from coming to an easy conclusion about her. Her black hair was
sharply silhouetted against the white sheet. The hand that held
Driscoll's wore a plain gold marriage-ring. She seemed to feel the light
or the scrutiny of a strange glance, for she stirred and opened her gray
eyes. Gano was momentarily embarrassed--she not in the least. She turned
quickly to look at the sleeper.
"Wait!" she whispered, as Gano seemed to be turning away.
She put her finger on the sick man's pulse, and, still kneeling there,
counted the beats with absorbed, unselfconscious face. Gano was struck
again with the "mother" quality in the woman. It gave all she did a
definite modesty. She was getting up.
"Can you spare the light?" she whispered. "I forgot to bring--"
"Of course," interrupted Gano.
He set the lamp down, and turned to the door.
"Wait a moment."
She hung the _Figaro_ over the back of the chair between the sleeper and
the light, then, quietly and without haste, she took her brown cape and
hat off the peg and put them on. She leaned a moment over the sleeper,
and then, "Come!" she signed rather then said, and they went softly out.
At the foot of the stairs she stopped.
"Can you get a candle and a piece of paper?"
"Yes; this is my room," said Gano, opening his door.
The moonlight came palely in at the single window. Without hesitation
she had followed him. He lit the candle by his bed.
"I want to leave you my address," she said. "I think he'll be all right
now, but if he should be worse don't leave him; send some one to this
address--send a _fiacre_."
She scribbled on the piece of paper, and laid it by the candle.
"Do you think I ought to sit up with him?" Gano asked, watching her
intently.
"No need to sit up; you can sleep on the sofa, can't you, or--"
"Or on the floor?" he asked, smiling a little at her matter-of-factness.
"Or on the floor," she repeated quietly. "Good-night."
She went out.
"Sha'n't I get you a cab?"
"No; I shall walk. Good-night;" and she was gone.
On the paper was written:
"_Mrs. Mary Burne,
21 Rue Blanche._"